Mark Gastineau forced a smile as he congratulated Michael Strahan for breaking his single-season sack record on the final day of the 2001 season. Gastineau, though, was incensed at how Strahan broke his record, and he let Brett Favre — the quarterback Strahan tackled for the record-breaking sack — know about it more than two decades later.
Strahan got the record after Favre (who was seen talking to Strahan moments earlier) slid right in front of him near the end of the game. As you’ll see in the video below, Gastineau confronted Favre at a memorabilia show last year. Favre was friendly at the beginning at the conversation, but Gastineau quickly made it clear that he had a two-decade-old ax to grind.
“I’m gonna get my sack back,” Gastineau told Favre. “I’m gonna get my sack back, dude. … You hurt me. You hurt me. You hear me? You really hurt me. You hurt me, Brett.”
Gastineau, whose 22.0 sacks in 1984 stood as the record for 17 years, feels that the NFL should have stepped in and disallowed Strahan’s record-breaking sack to count.
“The NFL should have stopped that,” he said. “(Favre) took that record away from me.”
Favre later responded to the video on social media. He said that the sack was the result of him deciding to run a bootleg and “squeeze the last bit of fun out of a hard-fought game.” But instead of seeing an open field, Favre saw Strahan and immediately went down.
“In a different game or situation, I would have made a bigger effort to avoid the sack or TFL,” Favre wrote on X. “But at no point was I thinking about hurting Gastineau. Maybe it crossed my mind to help Strahan. I didn’t think it through. That wasn’t my forte at the time. I just wanted to have fun and compete. In retrospect, I understand how Gastineau feels. We played a brutal game. Gastineau played during an era where guys didn’t make generational wealth.
“I see now how being the Sack…
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